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Business Recorder
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Recorder
Art Dubai concludes: A touch of Pakistan evident at region's leading fair
Art Dubai concluded on Sunday, shedding a light on Pakistani artists who used vibrant colours, masterful compositions and symbols to tell stories through their displayed works. The region's leading international art show showcased galleries from around the world, while becoming a platform for multiple South Asian artists, including plenty from Pakistan. Faiza Butt, a UK-based artist of Pakistani origin, has showcased her work around the world. At Art Dubai this year, she presented her work depicting the Muslim man. 'The body of work you see here generally shows men who are some of them are Muslim men as your first reading of the image,' she told Business Recorder at the fair, 'but we also have a Hasidic Jewish man and we also have a head of a classical Halkidiki from the Greek time.' Art Dubai 2025: Anwar Saeed, Huma Mulji among Pakistani artists to exhibit this year While at Slade School of Fine Art, Butt was inspired to draw the feminine form. A deeper look at the extensive body of work around the female form made her reconsider her options. 'So to reject the western history as not the history of the world but the history of the west and its domination of how we understand and perceive certain genres in art,' she explained, 'I picked up this concept of working with the male form.' Before Slade, Butt had been a student at Lahore's famed National College of Arts (NCA), where she studied from renowned Pakistani artist, Anwar Saeed. His works, which was also displayed side-by-side with hers, deeply inspired her and gave her a launchpad for her current art theme, she said. 'As a social commentator, I want my work to be purposeful,' said Butt. 'I think as long as I can provoke people to ask a question to break the ice and to work on pre-existing presumptions, cultural framings.' She isn't trying to change society, Butt clarified, she's only trying to start a conversation. 'I cannot change the world but as long as I can provoke or shake up the existing presumptions that could be a healthy start for the community,' she explained. Butt was surrounded by a dozen people at Grosvenor Gallery, one among the 140 other pop-ups at the show. She explained her thought process behind a piece 'Get out of my dreams' that showed two men posing together, framed by colourful items, each of which had a meaning for Butt. The images she uses are journalistic photos, which she refines by hand, and then wraps in themes inspired by Pakistani truck art and the larger than life, vintage movie posters she saw in Lahore. Butt wasn't the only one instilling Lahore in her art work. 'Global cultural hub': Art Dubai draws to a close Maryam Baniasadi, who moved to Pakistan in 2012 from Iran, documented her journey through NCA in miniature paintings. 'Pakistan was really inspiring for me,' said the artist, who lives in Lahore with her husband. 'The architecture, the nature, the vibrant colours － so I used a lot of composites in my work also, like nature is there.' Baniasadi said she also tries to reflect the political environment around her in her work. 'When I moved to Pakistan, there was a lot of security [issues] in Pakistan,' she said. 'You can't tell that this painting has, like, you know, the tension of the city. It's calm.' Baniasadi said she hopes her journey from being a visitor to Art Dubai to exhibiting her work here will inspire other Pakistani artists to try, too. She was enjoying her first time exhibiting her work at LATITUDE 28, an Indian art gallery, which was showcasing works from other Pakistani artists as well. 'We have a nice roster of artists from Pakistan,' said Bhavna Kakar, who owns Latitude walls of her gallery were adorned with works by Noor Ali Chagani, Farhat Ali, Waseem Ahmed, and Khadim Ali. All these Pakistani artists, she said, added to strongly to her gallery's theme of miniature and sculpture. 'Each one has their distinct identity which adds so much to what we already do,' said Kakar. In another part of the art show, Hannah Matin, gallery associate, agreed with her peer about how artists from different backgrounds complement each other's works. She was referring to Pakistani artists Sana Arjumand's work displayed at Aicon Gallery, a New York-based art shop that specializes in contemporary works created by emerging and established Indian and Pakistani artists. Arjumand's piece title 'The Perfect Mirror' was specially placed across from an monumental piece by Nigerian artist Peju Alatise, said Matin, because the visuals of the former piece corresponded well with the sectioning of the Alatise's expansive, brightly coloured creation. Prajit Dutta, Aicon's owner, said Matin, has a special passion for highlighting artists from India and Pakistan. 'They really encapsulate the cultures of Pakistan and India in a very beautiful way,' she noted. 'For example, Sana Arjumand's work, it's all about the sense of spirituality and female representation in Pakistan.' Arjumand was unable to attend the event due to visa issues, but her art piece was sold for more than $20,000 and was displayed with the likes of Pakistan's famous artist Sadequain. The fair, which ran from April 18-20 (with previews on the 16th and 17th) also featured an Art Dubai Modern segment with presentations by the region's modern masters. The event, held near beachside at Madinat Jumeirah, also featured Digital Summit, a unique curated section dedicated to pioneering artists, collectives, galleries and platforms who are shaping today's digital art world. At a press conference earlier in the week, Art Dubai's artistic director had said said, 'Dubai is a unique, global city, one which is home to communities and peoples from all over the world, with different languages and traditions and, as we approach our twentieth year, the fair has become the main platform and commercial marketplace for galleries and artists from these scenes and geographies. We are proud to champion these voices, supporting a more diverse and global art world.' Art Dubai is held under the patronage of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai.
The Independent
01-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Post-its and gigantic babies, Ed Atkins's daring Tate exhibit proves he's the most interesting artist in Britain today
It's been a good decade since Ed Atkins was first mooted as a potentially major figure in British art, for computer-generated videos and animations that appeared dizzyingly ahead of the technical and conceptual curve. If he seemed to disappear from view over lockdown (as did many artists) he returns now to the limelight as the recipient of a major survey exhibition at Tate Britain – one of very few living, let alone younger, artists to be accorded that honour. The show is taking place in a digital terrain that's vastly more complex and embattled than it was even five years ago, where there is not just a 'dwindling gap between the digital world and human experience', as the blurb puts it, but a universal understanding that it's ever more difficult to get a reaction from the over-saturated consumer, and people, faced with an increasing number of communication platforms, crave above all the authenticity of the face-to-face. Far from trying to side-step these issues, the exhibition plays with them sometimes brilliantly, and occasionally hilariously, in a range of mediums from ultra-high tech digital reconstruction to handmade drawings, embroidery and that great under-explored artistic resource known as the Post-it note. The now 42-year-old, Oxford-born, Copenhagen-based Atkins appears in various digitized incarnations, as the show muses on the theme of loss, building towards the culminating work, a feature length film on the death of his father. There's clearly no shortage of ambition here then, though some of the most engaging video works are the earliest and most technically primitive, cobbled together with laptops and cell phones. Described in the wall text as 'a very intimate video that quickly sheds its specificity in order to foreground its construction', Cur (2010) put me in mind of someone trying to re-stage 2001 A Space Odyssey on their kitchen table, with pieces of fruit and the tops of people's heads looming planet-like out of the darkness. These works, completed immediately after Atkins finished studies at London's Slade School of Fine Art, are offset by hand-embroidered 'samplers', as Atkins calls them, pieces of cloth covering the soundproofing screens embroidered with barely perceptible lines from his father's cancer diaries, which form the central text of the show's final film. In place of the usual dry-as-dust wall texts, Atkins has provided his own chattily informal written commentaries (his parents are 'my mum and dad'). He's nothing if not lucid as a guide to his own show, but there were times when I wanted to shake him off and come to my own conclusions. In Hisser (2015), a 'customised stock figure from the online marketplace Turbosquid' stands in for Atkins, in a restaging of the true story of a man from Florida who was swallowed into a sinkhole while asleep in bed. Atkins's naked digitized surrogate is seen masturbating (though facing away from the 'camera') and lying in bed fretfully mouthing the words to a pop song (I believe it's Elton John and Kiki Dee's 'Don't Go Breaking My Heart'). The fact that his disappearance into the sinkhole feels like a cursory afterthought, leaves the point of the whole absurdly complex procedure a touch mystifying, which I dare say is the point. (2019), in which theatrical curtains draw back to reveal masses of mind-boggling junk – chains, skeletons, fish – crashing onto a stage in hyper-detailed images seems to test the very limits of the term 'animation', while arousing the sense that when everything is digitally possible, nothing feels truly same might be said of a gigantic baby playing a piano in a fairy-tale cottage or the generically medieval surrogate for Atkins who – looking a bit like Richard E Grant – shed s floods of gluey-looking grey tears. Is he supposed to be another manifestation of the show's central theme of loss? While the setting for this group of exhibits, huge double-tier racks of stage costumes, on loan from Berlin's Deutsche Oper, might be assumed to signify the etherealness of the absent human presence, it's their blunt actuality that impresses. Our developing sense of the exhibition as a competition between the surrogate and the actual is compounded in Pianowork 2 (2023), in which another Atkins surrogate – in this case looking so like him you'd swear it was straight film – 'mimes' to a recording of the real Atkins playing Jurg Frey's one-note composition 'Klavierstuck 2'. In this case, it feels like the analogue element has 'won'. While Frey's work represents a formalist avant-garde, which many would consider as obsolete as the hockiest digital technology, the piece's uncompromising discipline, in which the player physically counts out the spaces between the notes, feels as timelessly actual as, say, Michelangelo's David. The Worm (2021), in which a smartly dressed 'interviewer' figure plays Atkins's role in a real-life phone conversation with his mother, is described by the artist as an 'artificial documentary of something very much alive and utterly real'. It's that realness that compels our attention, though we are, of course, wondering how real the disembodied mother's voice actually is, even as she talks of her own struggles to make herself feel real to herself in the face of a difficult relationship with her mother. In the show's climactic work, the two-hour film Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me (2024), the digital is apparently abandoned altogether, though the film's gruelling content is still very much mediated by artifice. Toby Jones, everyone's favourite 'everyman' actor, reads out the diary kept by Atkins' father Philip, during the six months prior to his death from cancer in 2009 to a small audience of young people. The diaries' admirably matter-of-fact and unsentimental tone is maintained in the film, resisting the temptation to make the material more 'moving' than it already is. Most visitors will probably drop in and out of it, rather than try to do it in one sitting, but – without wishing to give too much away – they shouldn't miss the end when Jones and his on-screen partner Claire (Saskia Reeves) suddenly start enacting a childlike game of nurses and patients, that was played in real life by Atkins and his daughter. If this sounds a shade silly and self-indulgent, there's a palpable sense of the changing of generations: the performed creativity of the parent who is departing is replaced by that of the child who has just arrived. The artist's daughter reappears as the recipient of a series of Post-it note drawings, which Atkins has placed in her lunchbox each day during lockdown, when his ongoing projects were suspended, as 'little hellos, little irruptions of love into her day'.While the drawings themselves are fun, and occasionally border on brilliant, it's Atkins' realisation that the gesture was far more important for him than it was for her (something every parent will instantly recognise) that makes them poignant, and his belief that they are 'the best things' he's done that makes them Atkins's garrulous commentaries do occasionally exasperate earlier on in the exhibition, they make more sense as the themes develop. While the show feels as though it will be all about clever concepts and impenetrably stylish surfaces, it is one of the most heartfelt and overtly autobiographical exhibitions I've ever experienced – as well as being undeniably very clever. The cycle of life from parents to children to grandchildren is paralleled by the cycle of technology, from low-tech, to high-tech, to no-tech. I came to this exhibition skeptical of some of the claims made for Atkins' significance as an artist, but I came away a lot more convinced than I expected. If there's a more interesting artist working in Britain today I haven't yet encountered them.
Asharq Al-Awsat
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Asharq Al-Awsat
'Fake' Rubens Masterpiece Debate Reignited by New Book
Gaudy colors, messy brushwork, even a set of missing toes. The debate about the authenticity of a Rubens's masterpiece "Samson and Delilah" will be reignited next week with the release of a book alleging the painting hanging in London's National Gallery is really a copy. The work by the 17th century Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens was purchased by the gallery in 1980 for £2.5 million ($3.1 million), then the second-highest price ever paid for a painting at auction. Every year tens of thousands of visitors view the work, lauded by the world-famous gallery for the artist's use of "highly contrasting light and shade and deep rich color work". It's not a view shared, however, by Greek painter and art historian Euphrosyne Doxiadis whose book "NG6461: The Fake Rubens" comes out next week. Although the National Gallery remains convinced of the painting's authenticity, Doxiadis is adamant that it cannot have been painted by Rubens. "Rubens was meant to have painted a Samson and Delilah... (but) this painting in the National Gallery is certainly not it," she told AFP by telephone from Greece. Based on the Old Testament story of the Israelite hero Samson, the painting depicts the moment an accomplice of his treacherous lover Delilah cuts off his hair, the source of his warrior power. Rubens completed the canvas around 1609, but it mysteriously went missing for nearly three centuries before resurfacing in Paris in 1929. After changing hands, it was eventually resold to the National Gallery Doxiadis, 78, said she "instantly" spotted problems with the painting on seeing it four decades ago. 'Detective' hunt "In 1985, I was wandering around alone and I saw it and I thought it was just a bad copy that they'd borrowed," she said. Doxiadis, who studied at London's Slade School of Fine Art, said the painting's "cartoon" colors were the biggest red flag. "Above all it was the lack of color harmony, it was just gaudy... (and) the drawing, the composition were totally out of sync," she said. "Also I didn't notice at the time but the foot of Samson is out of the picture -- the toes are missing," she said, adding: "It's a joke!" Her theory is consistent with previously expressed doubts. Contemporaneous reproductions show three soldiers in the doorway rather than the five in the National Gallery work. It was several years after she first laid eyes on "Samson and Delilah" that Doxiadis learned that far from being an acknowledged copy, the painting had been acquired by the London institution for a vast sum. That discovery so shocked her that she launched a 40-year "detective" hunt. "When I started this whole research I never thought I'd be lucky enough to find out who painted this copy but I did," she said. Her findings point to the work of three separate hands at the San Fernando Fine Art Royal Academy in Madrid. 'Dictatorship of experts' "It had become one of the rules of the academy that the students would do copies from old masters. It began in the early 19th century and went on until around 1910," she said. Doxiadis said it was not intended to be a fake but after it was sold in Paris in good faith, the new owner succeeded in having it "authenticated" by an expert, sealing its status as an original "masterpiece". Publishers were reluctant to take Doxiadis's book on although the independent London-based Eris press, distributed by Columbia University Press, eventually came to her rescue. "There's a dictatorship of experts ... Everyone was closing doors because they didn't want to get involved with something so controversial." The publicly owned National Gallery has not reacted to the book although it told AFP in a statement the work had "long been accepted by leading Rubens scholars as a masterpiece by Peter Paul Rubens". "A technical examination of the picture was presented in an article in the National Gallery's Technical Bulletin in 1983. The findings remain valid," it added. Doxiadis said she remained motivated by a sense of outrage on behalf of the artist and concern that the price tag had been funded by taxpayers' money. "NG6461: The Fake Rubens", whose title refers to the painting's inventory number, will be published on Wednesday.
Yahoo
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
'Fake' Rubens masterpiece debate reignited by new book
Gaudy colours, messy brushwork, even a set of missing toes. The debate about the authenticity of a Rubens's masterpiece "Samson and Delilah" will be reignited next week with the release of a book alleging the painting hanging in London's National Gallery is really a copy. The work by the 17th century Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens was purchased by the gallery in 1980 for £2.5 million ($3.1 million), then the second-highest price ever paid for a painting at auction. Every year tens of thousands of visitors view the work, lauded by the world-famous gallery for the artist's use of "highly contrasting light and shade and deep rich colour work". It's not a view shared, however, by Greek painter and art historian Euphrosyne Doxiadis whose book "NG6461: The Fake Rubens" comes out next week. Although the National Gallery remains convinced of the painting's authenticity, Doxiadis is adamant that it cannot have been painted by Rubens. "Rubens was meant to have painted a Samson and Delilah... (but) this painting in the National Gallery is certainly not it," she told AFP by telephone from Greece. Based on the Old Testament story of the Israelite hero Samson, the painting depicts the moment an accomplice of his treacherous lover Delilah cuts off his hair, the source of his warrior power. Rubens completed the canvas around 1609, but it mysteriously went missing for nearly three centuries before resurfacing in Paris in 1929. After changing hands, it was eventually resold to the National Gallery Doxiadis, 78, said she "instantly" spotted problems with the painting on seeing it four decades ago. - 'Detective' hunt - "In 1985, I was wandering around alone and I saw it and I thought it was just a bad copy that they'd borrowed," she said. Doxiadis, who studied at London's Slade School of Fine Art, said the painting's "cartoon" colours were the biggest red flag. "Above all it was the lack of colour harmony, it was just gaudy... (and) the drawing, the composition were totally out of sync," she said. "Also I didn't notice at the time but the foot of Samson is out of the picture -- the toes are missing," she said, adding: "It's a joke!" Her theory is consistent with previously expressed doubts. Contemporaneous reproductions show three soldiers in the doorway rather than the five in the National Gallery work. It was several years after she first laid eyes on "Samson and Delilah" that Doxiadis learned that far from being an acknowledged copy, the painting had been acquired by the London institution for a vast sum. That discovery so shocked her that she launched a 40-year "detective" hunt. "When I started this whole research I never thought I'd be lucky enough to find out who painted this copy but I did," she said. Her findings point to the work of three separate hands at the San Fernando Fine Art Royal Academy in Madrid. - 'Dictatorship of experts' - "It had become one of the rules of the academy that the students would do copies from old masters. It began in the early 19th century and went on until around 1910," she said. Doxiadis said it was not intended to be a fake but after it was sold in Paris in good faith, the new owner succeeded in having it "authenticated" by an expert, sealing its status as an original "masterpiece". Publishers were reluctant to take Doxiadis's book on although the independent London-based Eris press, distributed by Columbia University Press, eventually came to her rescue. "There's a dictatorship of experts ... Everyone was closing doors because they didn't want to get involved with something so controversial." The publicly owned National Gallery has not reacted to the book although it told AFP in a statement the work had "long been accepted by leading Rubens scholars as a masterpiece by Peter Paul Rubens". "A technical examination of the picture was presented in an article in the National Gallery's Technical Bulletin in 1983. The findings remain valid," it added. Doxiadis said she remained motivated by a sense of outrage on behalf of the artist and concern that the price tag had been funded by taxpayers' money. "NG6461: The Fake Rubens", whose title refers to the painting's inventory number, will be published on Wednesday. har/jkb/tw/sco
